Amazon kisses last Oracle database goodbye, completes years-long migration

Dive Brief:

After "several years" Amazon wrapped up its database migration from Oracle to Amazon Web Services, according to a blog post Tuesday from Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS.
About 75 petabytes of internal data stored across 7,500 Oracle databases was spread across AWS database services, including DynamoDB, Aurora, Relational Database Service (RDS) and Redshift. "The migrations were accomplished with little or no downtime, and covered 100% of our proprietary systems," said Barr.
The migration effort required more than 100 teams in Amazon's consumer business, including Alexa, Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Fresh, according to Barr.

Dive Insight:

Amazon's reliance on Oracle databases weakened as AWS matured.

Amazon's database administrators "spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted," said Barr, which included dedicating time to "inefficient hardware provisioning, license management, and many other issues that are now best handled by modern, managed database services."

With the exception of some third-party applications "tightly-bound to Oracle," Amazon is free from Oracle.

In November, AWS CEO Andy Jassy declared Amazon's databases would run free from Oracle by the end of 2019. At the time, Amazon had moved its data warehouse onto AWS service Redshift, away from Oracle.

Amazon's relationship with the vendor was routinely cheapened by remarks from Oracle CTO Larry Ellison.

In December Ellison claimed there was "no way" customers would migrate from an Oracle database to an AWS database. While AWS made its database technology available on the cloud before Oracle, Ellison maintained migrations would be too costly and labor intensive to justify.

Ellison wasn't entirely wrong. The migration had hiccups.

By October 2018, Amazon finished about 92% of its migration onto its internal Aurora PostgreSQL. But during the shift, an Amazon warehouse in Ohio experienced the creation of too many savepoints, resulting in a temporary slowdown of a database.

The team responsible for the migration was aware of the protocols of savepoint management between Aurora and Oracle, yet applications still suffered "intermittent timeouts," according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

Amazon isn't alone in its shift away from Oracle. Salesforce is working to eliminate Oracle software from its crucial business systems, reportedly developing an internal database for customer management.